187. 9/11: The Rise of Osama bin Laden (Ep 1)

18:09Gordon:Well, he's got an organization. Yeah. So it's kind of like, what do you do with this group of people who are dedicated to jihad, to fighting infidel invaders and apostates, wherever they might be, but who do you focus on? And it takes bin Laden some time to work out and answer. And I think the first turning point for him is in 1990. Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait, first Gulf War. and bin Laden, who again is kind of fresh from what he sees as this massive kind of world-changing victory in Afghanistan, comes up with an idea that I think to me sounds insane. He says, I want to raise an army of veterans, of Arab veterans.

18:49Gordon:I want to use Al-Qaeda and groups like it to defend Saudi Arabia against a potential invasion from Saddam.

18:57David:Which is mad against Saddam Hussein, who had one of the largest armies in the world. And you know, the idea of these - And it just steamrolled over Kuwait. Yeah. And that they're going to defend Saudi Arabia. And of course, what happens is the Saudi government say, no, thank you very much, young princeling. We're not really interested in you. We'll take the Americans' help. So American troops then come in to base themselves in Saudi Arabia - Hundreds of thousands. Hundreds of thousands. And then to drive Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. And this angers Bin Laden, doesn't it? Because it's the combination of him being rejected and then Americans having come into what he sees as the Holy Land, you know, of Saudi Arabia and all these American troops coming in.

19:37David:And that is one of the first steps that leads him eventually into this conflict against the US, isn't it?

19:43Gordon:Well, we should say, I think prior to the early 1990s, he has a kind of quietist

19:49David:anti-Americanism.

19:50Gordon:It would have been very on brand for a Saudi who happens to be fighting the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Bin Laden at this point doesn't really understand America. I don't think he actually ever will. He's been to Britain.

20:05David:Spent time here.

20:06Gordon:That's right. He's a big Arsenal fan.

20:07David:He went to the Arsenal.

20:08Gordon:Yeah. He's a big Arsenal fan. But it does. I think the rejection by the Saudi royal family and then now the presence of hundreds of thousands of what he sees as infidels on the soil of the kingdom turn that really quiet anti-Americanism into something that becomes closer to an obsession. And he starts to speak of it openly. And for the Saudi regime that's hosting hundreds of thousands of American troops for protection, it's very awkward.

20:38David:So that will lead to him going to Sudan 1992. And there again, this interesting period where he's in Sudan, I think for four years, where he's trying to keep Al-Qaeda going, isn't he? He's He wants to do something with it, but it's not quite clear what it's going to be yet. They're running businesses, but they're also still doing training camps. It's a weird mix in those years. But he's also starting to develop a sense of maybe America is going to be my next enemy that I'm going to take on.

21:10Gordon:And it's really from Sudan that some of the first blows from Al-Qaeda land against the U.S. So then in December of 92, we have these hotels in Yemen that are kind of being used as a way station for US troops that are going onward to Somalia. Bombs go off there, probably linked to Al Qaeda. And then in 1993, we talked about this a little bit in the series we did on Black Hawk Down, it's likely that fighters that are sort of Al Qaeda adjacent, linked to his network, are actually connected to some of the downings of Black Hawk helicopters in Mogadishu.

21:46David:Which is really interesting, isn't it? Because we talked about this in the series, how the Battle of Mogadishu leads to America effectively withdrawing. And Osama bin Laden takes the lesson from that, which is if you can inflict some blows on America, they will withdraw. and that becomes one of his ideas, which is America is a kind of paper tiger, is the way it's described, where if you can inflict some blows on it in the Middle East, then they will withdraw from the Middle East and because they're supporting the Middle East apostate regimes, those regimes will then fall to the Islamist worldview and radicalism that he wants to impose.

22:28David:That becomes his thinking through the 90s, doesn't it?

22:31Gordon:Broadly, I think, yeah, paper tiger is the right way to think about it. He believes that America is casualty averse and soft. By 1994, he has become such a problem for the Saudi state. Because you imagine the Saudi state is deeply connected to the United States of America. And to the bin Laden family. And to the bin Laden family. And he is this guy that wants to raise an army to push Saddam out. At this stage, bin Laden is seen as a kind of financier. Financier and organizer. An organizer of these operations. But even so, that creates real problems for the Saudis. So they strip him of his citizenship, which is not a common thing to do.

23:14Gordon:And he goes to Afghanistan. And he goes to Afghanistan. We should say also, I mean, a lot of his investments in Sudan had gone poorly. He is connected, again, in kind of a financier organizer way to a plot to kill the Egyptian president. So creating all kinds of problems. The Sudanese are squeezed. He goes to Afghanistan.

23:31David:Where he's sheltered by the Taliban, the new rising Islamist movement engaged in a civil war in Afghanistan. They're going to eventually take over almost all of the country. He's back in Afghanistan. He's got a base now in Afghanistan where he can run training camps and where he's going to start to issue increasingly aggressive calls for violence and action against the United States.

23:54Gordon:Namely declaring war against the United States. So in August of 1996, He's in Afghanistan and he issues what is called the Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places. And it has the kind of melodramatic dateline from the peaks of the Hindu Kush, Afghanistan. And in it, there's a bunch of grievances that he throws out there. But the big one is that he demands that all Muslims help forcibly expel Americans and Jews from Islamic lands. You know, this is kind of the first time publicly that he has come out and said that America is my enemy. is my enemy. And again, it's worth resting for a moment on his ideas because it is in some ways kind of a crazy logic process.

24:49Gordon:And he calls it, we need to cut off the head of the snake. America is the head of the snake. And instead of actually fighting what he sees as the apostate regimes around the Islamic world, you need to go and you actually need to take the fight to America. and then they all crumble. Now, in February of 98, so a few years later, he goes even further and he proclaims a kind of a fatwa where he states that it is basically any Muslim's duty to kill Americans, civilian and military alike, anywhere on earth, which is a very expansive declaration.

25:26David:And what's amazing is he starts giving interviews, including to American journalists. you know, saying, I'm declaring war on you. I consider all of you my enemy. We're going to kill you. And still at this time, it doesn't actually raise that much attention. People are not taking him seriously until August 1998, when Al-Qaeda really strikes for the first time with two enormous truck bombs almost simultaneously hitting two US embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. And I mean, these are massive. I mean, more than 200 people are killed, most of them locals, not Americans. So, you know, already the first sign that actually it's not just indiscriminate violence against American civilians and military, but against them, you know, Muslims are going to pay the biggest price for al-Qaeda's violence.

26:16David:And it's clear immediately that it's bin Laden. I mean, he's acting on his intent at that point.

26:22Gordon:And the response directed against bin Laden from those attacks, I think will be very characteristic of how the US deals with it. Pretty limited. In the late 1990s, it's limited.

26:33David:A couple of cruise missiles, training camps in Afghanistan. Right.

26:36Gordon:And when we say training camps, we're talking about mud hut structures, rustic infrastructure, the kind of thing that even if it is quote unquote destroyed, can be built back in a matter of weeks. One of the missiles ends up targeting a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan that's thought to still be an Al-Qaeda facility, which is totally incorrect. And those missiles miss bin Laden probably just by a few hours. And then nothing else happens. The retaliation ends there. So again, I think it reinforces bin Laden's idea that the Americans are sort of paradoxically the entity supporting every regime that he doesn't like in the Middle East, but are also kind of weak at the same time.

27:19Gordon:And then he keeps going.

27:20David:He strikes again in October 2000. two suicide bombers guide a small boat packed with explosives and that goes alongside a u.s destroyer the uss coal as it refuels in yemen and it blows up a hole in the side of it 17 american sailors killed an attack on the u.s military but again you know investigations you know the fbi starts investigating the cia looking at it but no retaliation really and so by the turn of the century, what we have is bin Laden hitting the United States, striking at it. The US not really hitting back that hard. And now bin Laden plotting what will be his most dramatic and fateful attack.

28:01David:Let's take a break there.

28:07David:Welcome back. So we've set up this idea of Osama bin Laden increasingly striking the United States and talking about wanting to strike the United States, which does raise the question of what the US and particularly the CIA, the FBI, the US intelligence community is doing about it.

28:26Gordon:By the mid-1990s, there are a handful of people in the State Department, in the FBI, in the CIA, who are paying attention to him. And by early 1996, the CIA stands up a station that is specifically dedicated to hunting bin Laden. It is the agency's first virtual station, meaning it's not a station in the capital of a country. It's not London Station. It's not a station in Jordan. It's a virtual station in a really unremarkable and unmarked building in Northern Virginia. And it is named after the son of that station's first chief, Alec. So it is called Alec Station.

29:08David:And we should talk a little bit about that first chief. I mean, a guy called Michael Scheuer. I got to know Mike Scheuer a bit after 9-11, actually. Very intense guy, it's fair to say. I mean, an obsessive about bin Laden. And when I met him, he had a beard. He was quite zealous in his own way and fierce about the idea that he'd been the one to see the threat from bin Laden and had been trying to warn others about it. and he would feel ignored about it. An analyst by background, which I guess maybe that was some of the tension. Maybe he was seen. You're a former analyst, David, at the CIA. Maybe the operations guys, you know, didn't take him as seriously because he was an analyst.

29:49David:Or maybe it was his character partly, but that will become part of the story, won't it? It is some of the tension and the questions around whether others take the threat seriously

29:59Gordon:that he's warning about. Well, Michael Morrell, who at the time was a senior analyst at the CIA, and who will rise to become the deputy director and the acting director. And we actually have an interview with him because he was President Bush's PDB briefer.

30:14David:Daily briefer on 9-11.

30:16Gordon:On 9-11. Yeah, so we talked to him about that for the bonus. That's right. And in his memoir, Michael Morell calls Scheuer a zealot. Yeah. And the Alex Station crew will become known inside the CIA as the Manson family. Yeah. So it is this kind of weird subset of the agency at the time. I do think it is, your point about Scheuer being an analyst is really important. Because if you're setting up a unit at the CIA, a task force, whatever it is, to go and do something operationally, in this case, which is targeting and maybe trying to kidnap or kill bin Laden, you would put, if you really believed in it and you wanted it done, you would put a case officer.

30:59Gordon:A top case officer. in charge. You would not put an analyst in charge. The fact that he's an analyst is important to the story of how does Bin Laden keep getting away in the late 1990s. I think some of the plans that Scheuer will come up with are not treated with seriousness.

31:17David:Because he and the others are treated as those crazy guys over there in the corner. It's a bit like that, constantly going on about Bin Laden. And that's part of the feel of it, isn't it? quite female heavy team as well around him. And also FBI agents, and this is part of the story which we'll come to when it's the issue of where they're missed opportunities, FBI agents also embedded with that CIA team.

31:38Gordon:Yeah, which is very common now. I mean, I believe that the head of the counterintelligence mission center at the CIA is an actual FBI special agent. So we have this integration between CIA and FBI now has become much more common. In the mid-1990s, this was a science experiment with two agencies that didn't really work well together at all. And there are deep structural and organizational differences between the CIA and the FBI, our friends, the Pheebs, which will definitely be a theme of this story. Now, all of this, the CIA beginning to notice bin Laden standing up Alex Station. This is all happening.

32:22Gordon:I think it's important to say this. It's all happening in the context of a US intelligence community in the 1990s that is not in particularly good shape. There was what was called a peace dividend at the end of the Cold War. The budgets are being cut. Budgets are cut. George Tenet, who's the CIA director and will be one of the main characters in the story, will later say that the CIA's budget declined by just about 20 % in real terms in the 1990s, and a quarter of the workforce leaves.

32:51David:And morale is low as well, isn't it? 1994, you have Rick Ames discovered to be a CIA traitor. People in Congress are saying, maybe we should break this place up. Do we need it? So there's real pressure. And as you said, George Tenet is a really interesting character because he's going to become CIA director trying to restore or even just maintain the capability of the CIA.

33:12Gordon:It's worth setting up Tenet for a moment because he is such a character. So he's he's this really gregarious, hardworking, very politically astute, cigar chomping guy who's the son of Greek immigrants and who has risen through this kind of labyrinth of different D.C. postings to become including, you know, staffing roles, the White House and in Congress to become what at the time was known as the DCI, the director of central intelligence. It's a people person, very charming, very direct. He walks around headquarters and meets people. He sits down at cafeteria tables. I think he becomes one of the most important directors in the modern history of the agency.

33:55Gordon:And what he'll say in his memoir is that in the mid and late 1990s, if you were a really ambitious CIA officer who was trying to make your name for yourself, either in the analytical wing or in the operations wing, terrorism wasn't where you went. This is kind of a backwater in the mid to late 1990s. And it's happening again at a time where the intelligence community is in some ways on the ropes. Now, in the late 1990s, there are multiple and ultimately unsuccessful operations to go after bin Laden. Yeah.

34:33David:Plans are put up, including by Mike Shoya, who will later get very angry about some of these plans where they think they've got intelligence where bin Laden is, but maybe he's with some Middle East sheikhs. And so people say, no, we can't risk striking that target because we'll kill them. Other times people say, well, the intelligence wasn't as good as maybe it was suggested. But what it means is that in this period, there are attempts to go after bin Laden, but they never really follow through. And what you then get is a desire to maybe get more intelligence on the ground and to do more to penetrate al-Qaeda, to get the understanding of what it's doing and what it's up to.

35:12David:And that's a key priority. But to be honest, it's not hugely successful, is it?

35:17Gordon:Yeah, we did an episode over a year ago, I think, with a guy named Ed Bogan, who's a former CIA officer who had a lot of experience in the counterterrorism center. And I remember I was very struck because he said, you know, And we didn't really have a sense or an order of battle of Al Qaeda, the organization, until after 9-11. So looking at when you say Al Qaeda, I mean, even being able to fill out the upper rungs of the org chart at this point in time is not really possible. There is an Al Qaeda defector who walks in and starts to provide some intelligence.

35:51David:And the Brits actually have an agent inside Al Qaeda, but no one at the very top. And that is important, isn't it? Because I think, I mean, we'll go back to this issue and it will be a running theme of intelligence failure question mark around 9-11. Could it have been stopped? But arguably, this is the roots of it is not having an understanding, a penetration of the heart of Al-Qaeda to know the plans that have been developed. Yeah.

36:14Gordon:And there are maybe as many as four attempts to actually capture bin Laden or to kill him in the late 1990s. Ultimately, they don't they don't work, of course. One of them very famously involved the idea of actually using a team of Afghan tribesmen who were CIA assets to literally capture bin Laden and roll him up in a rug before putting him on a jet and sending him back to the U.S. to be arrested. This is the late 1990s. We don't have armed drones yet. So to target bin Laden, there isn't some constant stair drone capability over Afghanistan in this period. You have to know where he's going to be hours.

36:57Gordon:Where he's going to be in a few hours so that if you launch a cruise missile at him,

37:01David:by the time it arrives, he's still going to be there. And they never quite have that intelligence. So this is the problem. Bin Laden has declared war on the United States. The US, some parts of the US is worried about Bin Laden, but they haven't got the penetration of Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda.

37:17Gordon:There's also not a covert action or legal framework that is clear. About killing him. About killing him. which will be really important. And there's a lot of kind of mud slinging that has happened over the last 25 years over, you know, were the authorities actually clear? Were they not clear? What was the CIA authorized to do? There's a lot of he said, she said about that. What does seem clear, though, from at least the agency's perspective, is that there weren't clear authorities in the late 1990s that would have allowed them to actually go and kill him.

37:49David:And so without that penetration of al-Qaeda, the problem is they do not spot that something is brewing inside al-Qaeda, which is going to become 9-11. And so here we go back to 9-11 and to bin Laden and his role in it, because it's very interesting, isn't it? Because even though this attack will be associated so closely with Assad bin Laden, 9-11 wasn't actually his idea.

38:18Gordon:The idea for 9-11 comes from a kind of freelance terrorist. It is the brainchild of a guy named Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is hereafter known as KSM. Spoiler alert, it's not going to go well for KSM. And I remember seeing his AK-47 on the wall at CIA headquarters in one of the, I think it was in a special activities division conference room. We actually have his captured AK-47 framed up on the wall. KSM is the principal architect of the attacks. Now, let's set him up briefly because his character is important. He is a highly educated engineer. Again, a running theme of some of these terrorist masterminds is they have engineering backgrounds.

39:08Gordon:Which is interesting, yeah. He's raised in Kuwait, but the family has roots in Pakistan. After secondary school in Kuwait, he actually enrolls in 1983 at Chowin College, which is a small Baptist school in Murfreesboro, North Carolina. Wow. And he does that to work on his English. He then transfers to North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro, where he pursues a mechanical engineering degree. KSM is already religious before he leaves home. And on campus in North Carolina, he's kind of squarely in this camp of what students there have remembered as the mullahs, which is a block of really conservative, largely bearded, you know, five times a day prayer.

39:54Gordon:conservative guys who, inside their own little world, police, religious observance, they pray in makeshift department mosques, they recruit new arrivals, new Muslim arrivals, who were obviously total aliens in North Carolina at that time, sometimes even going and meeting them at the airport. And KSM is devout. I mean, one of his classmates at Choen remembers that KSM, for example, reproached him for eating pork.

40:23David:Do you think his time in the US, I mean, he does get a bit of harassment from, you know, others there. I mean, do you think this turns him against America? What happens to him there?

40:34Gordon:I do. I think it plays a role. I believe he probably already had, you know, as we said, bin Laden did this kind of - He's already religious. He's already religious. There's already kind of a latent anti-Americanism. There's a disdain for American foreign policy in the Middle East that would all be, again, very common, very on brand for a Muslim of his generation who's grown up in conservative circles in the Middle East. But he's treated with pretty outright racial harassment and discrimination while he is in the States. I mean, there's some harassment that Terry McDermott, a writer who has a terrific book on the 9-11 hijackers and kind of planning team called Perfect Soldiers, talks about how KSM's old high school teacher would describe stories about garbage cans of water being propped up against doors.

41:25Gordon:So when KSM and his friends might open them, disgusting water would spill everywhere. They'd get their shoes taken and thrown in the lake. And KSM returns from the States really pretty sad, withdrawn. It was a bad experience. And with the belief that most Americans hate Arabs and KSM will link this to Israel. He says, you know, Americans don't like Arabs because America is in league with the Israelis.

41:53David:And then he goes, I mean, in what must be a bizarre kind of culture shift from, you know, Greensboro, from, you know, North Carolina, from the US to Peshawar in Pakistan, and then into Afghanistan. And so he is going to be one of those, you know, jihadists, if we call them that, radicals, who is going to be attracted by the kind of same thing as Osama bin Laden, the fight in Afghanistan against the Soviets, the idea of this kind of great idealistic holy war.

42:21Gordon:He winds up doing at first really kind of menial administrative work for a cleric who had been one of bin Laden's guides and spiritual mentors. KSM meets bin Laden for the first time probably in 1989. So at the tail end of the Soviet Jihad, but they're not particularly close. You know, there's not there's not a deep rapport or friendship. Now, KSM, I think, is temperamentally very different from bin Laden. KSM is this kind of gregarious, outspoken showman. Right. And even physically, they're very different. Bin Laden is famously, you know, he's very tall. He's lean. KSM is very portly. He's bearded.

43:05Gordon:I mean, if you see the picture from his capture in Pakistan, I mean, the guy is he looks rumpled. He probably could have been and actually was an operations manager. Right. I mean, he's he had a day job for a while in the 1990s at Qatar's Ministry of Electricity and Water while he was kind of he was moonlighting going around the Gulf and shopping ideas for various plots. KSM is really a kind of terrorist entrepreneur. And the 9-11 Commission, when they evaluate him and his personality, talk about him having this mixture of imagination, technical aptitude, and importantly for the plot, managerial skill, operational skill.

43:53Gordon:So he thinks up all kinds of crazy ideas, right? Core bombings, assassinations, aircraft bombings, hijackings. How do you poison water reservoirs? So he's it's clear that KSM, I mean, unlike so many people who did the kind of jihadi tourism in Afghanistan and then just went home. The mixture of KSM's own religious beliefs, maybe his time in the States, his time in Afghanistan in the 80s, he has really, without being under the influence of bin Laden, adopted the same ideas, the same mentality about the nature of jihad and the connection between these violent acts and the Islamic world that he wants to help create.

44:40David:This entrepreneur idea is an interesting one as well. And it's also the engineer in him. He kind of understands how things works and the mechanics. And you can see bin Laden is this kind of aesthetic ideologue who's doing the kind of propaganda and the big ideas. But Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, KSM, is the guy who knows how to do things and get things done. At first, he's not actually a member of Al-Qaeda. You kind of feel like he's slightly keeping not his distance from bin Laden because he can see that bin Laden's a really interesting character, but he's more of a free agent. He's his own kind of independent operator in the jihadist world, working with others, maybe looking for people who've got backing.

45:20David:and he's also going to develop plots separately from al-Qaeda. I mean, actually in one case with a member of his own family, with his nephew.

45:30Gordon:Well, it is worth thinking about the early to mid-1990s. Al-Qaeda as a brand isn't really well known. And so the idea that he would be swirling around in the same networks but also feel enough independence to remain removed, he doesn't need to. But the family connection you mentioned is really important. Because KSM's nephew is a guy named Ramza Youssef, who had been the mastermind behind the first attempt to bring down the World Trade Center with this truck bomb, essentially, in one of the parking garages beneath the North Tower back in February of 1993. Now, that attack kills six, injures roughly a thousand.

46:08Gordon:It doesn't, of course, bring down the tower. But KSM has this connection to this guy who is taking the fight to the Americans. KSM plays a pretty minor role in that plot. He actually issues a single wire transfer to one of his nephew's co-conspirators. But again, he's got ambition. He's got this obsession. And he increasingly is directing his schemes in the same fashion as bin Laden outward against the US and the West. The most notorious of those schemes, which he codenamed Bojinka, was a plan that he came up with in Manila in the mid-1990s to blow up a dozen American airliners over the Pacific in a single coordinated way.

46:57Gordon:There is this fascination that he'll have with airliners that starts very early. And actually, as a test run, Ramzi Yousef, KSM's nephew, had planted a small bomb aboard a passenger jet, which actually kills a Japanese businessman before the plot is ultimately uncovered. And interestingly enough, that same cell had toyed with the idea of actually crashing an airliner into CIA headquarters at Langley.

47:24David:So the idea is already starting to bubble up. And I think you can see in Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's ideas that the desire for something big and something dramatic. I mean, that's KSM to some extent, the showman, as well as the entrepreneur. And then in the late 90s, we're going to see, you know, Bin Laden is now back in Afghanistan, late 90s. You know, he's come back from Sudan. And at this point, KSM, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Bin Laden will meet. Maybe the first time they've met since the late 80s in Afghanistan. And perhaps, you know, the link is KSM's nephew. Ramzi Youssef is, you know, someone people are interested in because he's done these dramatic plots and tried to do things.

48:03David:But this is the point KSM starts to build the idea of 9-11, which he will in turn communicate to bin Laden.

48:11Gordon:By 1996, bin Laden's star is rising. He's issued, we don't yet have the embassy bombings of 1998 or the bombing of the USS Cole, but we do have the declaration of war against the Americans that's come out in 1996. So more and more people in this kind of jihadist world are gravitating toward bin Laden, seeing him as a potential, as a leader in the movement. And so KSM is drawn to him. So they meet in mid-1996, as you mentioned, I think, not on the basis of their own friendship or even KSM's notoriety, but on the basis of the fact that Ramzi Youssef is his nephew. And at that meeting in Afghanistan with bin Laden in 1996, KSM will lay out a menu of terrorist operations.

49:05Gordon:One of them will become 9-11. Now, to your point on KSM being a showman, the original plot, you could describe it as grandiose. I might call it insane. And we know a lot of this because KSM talked about the details of this meeting later with American interrogators. The plot, the original idea, was not four airliners. It was 10. Now, in this scheme, nine of them would crash into targets on the east and west coast of the U.S. And it was a very expanded list of targets, of course. It included the World Trade Center. It also included the Pentagon, the CIA, FBI headquarters, nuclear power plants, the tallest buildings in California and Washington state.

49:56Gordon:Nine planes will go into those buildings. The 10th plane, KSM will reserve for himself. And his idea was, I'm going to hijack it. I'm going to order the killing of every adult male passenger on board. I will land it at a U.S. airport and then come out of the plane and deliver a speech denouncing American support for Israel and for repressive Arab governments. And I think here we see you could call it showmanship. You could also call it a serious case of main character syndrome. Yeah. Because he basically has set up a horrendously evil and violent B movie in which he's the star.

50:35David:Yeah.

50:36Gordon:It's also worth reflecting on just how novel at the time the idea is, because to that point, plane hijackings are much more about making a political statement, taking hostages. The hijackers want something. They're using the possession of the plane and the people on the plane to score a political point or to get something.

50:59David:We'd seen from the 70s onwards hijackings in which they say, fly me to this airport and we want these prisoners released, you know, who are being held in another country. So it might be a negotiation and we want to make a big statement. That was some of the Palestinian hijackings. You've also seen some bombs on planes as well. But what you've never seen is the kind of jihadist suicide bomber on a plane. combined, in this case, with what Khalid Sheikh Mohammed wanted, which was also then his own personal theatrics of being the one, the only person, notably, not to kill himself, slightly selfishly, you know, perhaps.

51:36David:He gets to deliver a speech. So he can deliver a speech. It's an evolution, but fundamentally quite a significant shift from the previous model of what plane hijackings would look like.

51:46Gordon:But beneath the surface, there were instances of planes being used as weapons. So there was a case where a disturbed gentleman in 1974 tries to hijack a DC-9 in Baltimore and wanted to fly it into the White House in an attempt to kill Nixon. And then there was a 1994 Air France hijacking when Algerian terrorists seized an airliner. The plot ends up being disrupted, but the French come out of it believing that the plan had been to actually fly it into the Eiffel Tower. So you have some little instances where planes are used as weapons. You also have a Tom Clancy novel, Dead of Honor, which is published in August of 1994.

52:33Gordon:And the book's climax, I remember reading this actually prior to 9-11 as a kid. The book's climax has an embittered Japan Airlines pilot who deliberately crashes a fully fueled Boeing 747 into the US Capitol during a joint session of Congress. Kills the president, most of Congress, the cabinet, joint chiefs, the Supreme Court, and it ends up vaulting Jack Ryan into the presidency. The CIA analyst somehow becomes president.

53:00David:You're not suggesting that the Tom Clancy novel was an influence on KSM. I mean, the timing is interesting, though, isn't it? There's no evidence for it.

53:08Gordon:There's no evidence for it. The point is that... It's in the air, this idea. It's kind of in the air. But the big picture at this point is hijackings have a political motivation and the terrorists want something. But you can kind of see this subtext in which a few people are starting to see airliners as potential weapons.

53:28David:And as we said, you know, we've seen before bombs on airliners. That's something we've seen. But of course, the advantage of using the airliner as a weapon is that the fuel on board means you can get a pretty significant explosion. So it turns a plane into a missile, effectively, an explosive-packed missile, which you can guide onto a target.

53:48Gordon:So a fully fueled 767 holds about 11 ,400 gallons of fuel. And what this means is it has the chemical energy of hundreds of tons of TNT. And the crucial bit, though, is that if it impacts a structure, it will sustain a fire because there's so much fuel that could weaken the integrity of that structure. So it's basically, it's not really a missile. It's a massive fuel bomb. So that's the idea that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's come up with.

54:23David:He presents it to bin Laden. But here's what's so interesting. Bin Laden's first response is, I don't think so.

54:30Gordon:He does, I guess, what a lot of CEOs might do in meetings where a subordinate comes up with a crazy idea and you're like, yeah, great idea. But that's great. But maybe not now. And this is 1996.

54:42David:Yeah. Yeah.

54:43Gordon:Bin Laden has, again, we don't have East Africa yet. We don't have the coal. He's just gotten to Afghanistan. So Bin Laden's political situation in 1996 is a little fraught. I mean, he's thinking also about how do I keep this sanctuary? Yeah. It's a bit too dramatic and a bit too big.

54:59David:And I guess as well, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is an outsider. He's not one of his subordinates in a sense, which might make it easier for Bin Laden to have accepted it maybe, or if it had been Bin Laden's own idea. But you wonder if there's a bit of a sense in which he's a bit unsure about taking an idea from this other guy and this showman and this entrepreneur. So, you know, they're circling around each other, aren't they? But they're not quite intertwined yet as a group.

55:28Gordon:I guess it's kind of like if a consultant pitches an idea from outside an organization, it's kind of easy to just say. Maybe later. Interesting idea. And at Tora Bora in Afghanistan, which is where this meeting in 1996 happens, bin Laden actually asks KSM to swear Bayat, to swear loyalty to him and to Al-Qaeda and to move his family to Afghanistan. And KSM says, no, I'm not going to. He wants to keep his independence. But I think there is, even though they don't know each other well, there's a mutual respect that both men have for each other. And I think this is crucial. There's a sense, even though they haven't consummated this yet, there's a sense that they could each use each other.

56:12Gordon:Yeah.

56:12David:And bin Laden's star is going to rise as he starts to declare war on the US, as we said, as he takes the attack to the Americans with the embassy bombings. And I guess that shows Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, actually, maybe this is the guy I should be working with. And so they're going to move closer together, aren't they?

56:31Gordon:It's interesting how KSM ingratiates himself into bin Laden's circle. Because through 1997 and 1998, KSM actually shuttles frequently between Pakistan and Afghanistan, visits with bin Laden. He does things... I mean, this is a great influencing technique, right? And it shows how savvy he is because KSM realizes, well, if I want to set myself up well with the boss, a way to do that is by making myself invaluable to his lieutenants. So he does things like he actually fixes al-Qaeda computers in the late 1990s. He brings them news clippings and kind of word from the outside world. He helps out on a freelance basis with media projects.

57:16Gordon:So he does things in particular for Osama bin Laden's military commander that are seen as very useful. He's a useful guy. He's seen as popular with the al-Qaeda rank and file in Afghanistan. He's seen as an intelligent manager and operations guy. His personality is seen as very even keel. And KSM, I think, is deeply moved by the embassy bombings in 1998. And he is convinced by that act that bin Laden is a very serious guy. He's really committed to striking America, which again, you know, KSM's nephew had tried to bring down the World Trade Center in 1993 and hadn't succeeded. So there's this kind of family ambition here.

58:02Gordon:And as the 90s go on, bin Laden himself is in a different position. His sanctuary in Afghanistan is much more secure. He's becoming a jihadist celebrity. The fact that bin Laden is targeted by the Americans…

58:19David:Raises his status. And missed. Yeah, exactly. And so that means that by the time we get to about the spring of 1999, that plot that KSM had come up with now suddenly looks more appealing to bin Laden. So suddenly the kind of stars between them have aligned. And bin Laden's going to summon Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to meet him in Kandahar and now say, let's do the airline plot. That idea you had back in 96, now I want to do it.

58:50Gordon:But he has some revisions. Bin Laden has some notes. And he says, let's not do 10 planes. That's too many. That insane speech you had, let's nix that. Because I'm the main character, Bin Laden, not you. I think there is some of that here. This is not going to be about you. But Bin Laden says, let's do it. Let's make it happen. And it's at this meeting in the spring of 1999, that they come up with the menu of targets. The White House, the Capitol, the Pentagon, and the World Trade Center. But this will be a running theme throughout the planning. There's a disagreement over the prioritization of those targets.

59:33Gordon:Now, by KSM's account, bin Laden wanted to destroy the White House and the Pentagon. KSM himself, maybe for family reasons, had pushed for the World Trade Center. His nephew had tried to hit it. And all three of them, because this is KSM, bin Laden, and then bin Laden's military commander who were in this meeting, all three of them wanted to hit the Capitol. And this disagreement about the prioritization in particular of the White House versus the Capitol is not resolved in 1999. And in fact, it's going to run on throughout the life of the plot. The key point here is that the operation is approved.

1:00:04Gordon:And within Al-Qaeda, the plot now has a name, and it is going to be called the Plains Operation. So there with the plot hatched, let's finish.

1:00:14David:And next time we'll look at how Khalid Sheikh Mohammed turns this idea of his into a plan and crucially how he goes about recruiting people, recruiting people who are able to live undercover in the West and who can be trained to fly planes into buildings. so do join us next time for that but a reminder of course if you want to hear it straight away and the rest of this series you can do so by being coming a member of the declassified club at the rest is classifier.com and you'll also get access to some of the great bonus episodes we've got sitting alongside these series including with mike morrell who was the cia briefer of president bush on the day of 9-11 itself and i mean the story he can tell about that day is absolutely remarkable but otherwise we'll see you next time we'll see you next time Thank you.